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Stephen Fry was once asked what he would say if, after death, he found himself trying to justify himself to God in front of the Pearly Gates. His response:
“Bone cancer, in babies? Seriously?”
The full response is worth reading:
I’d say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about? Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That’s what I would say.
I do? He rolls his eyes right in his guest’s face!
Sure, like an old Southern lady proclaiming, “Lordy, I have a case of the vapors!”
He’s just hamming it up for the camera in response to Fry’s (intentionally inflammatory) rhetoric.
That is the most generous reading I’ve ever seen anyone give anything.
That is a great clip. His answer is relentless and is an example for us all.
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This is addressed by Mr Fry’s remarks, which you should watch in full. He either says that god doesn’t exist or he’s a complete maniac. Atheism is actually the generous, optimistic interpretation.
If I would describe a paradise for humans I would set up a system where your suffer is short and smal but just enough to value the things you will be given. Once you reach a point where you don’t feel joy anymore because you have everything. Everything is taken from you and can again enjoy building up your achievements
As a parent, I scratch my head at this. We don’t pepper in abuse with parental love so that they’ll appreciate it. You just give and you give and you give. You lose sleep trying to figure out how you’re going to keep them perfectly safe and completely happy. God’s a shite dad.
Always relevant
The simple answer is that “God”, if it exists, can’t be viewed through human lenses. Maybe to God, evil doesn’t exist at all.
Well, what would you do if you were God? Or let me put it in a simpler way: supposing that every night you could dream any dream you wanted to dream. What would you do? Well, first of all, I’m quite sure that most of us would dream all the marvelous things we wanted to happen. We would fulfill all our wishes. And we might go on that way for months. Besides, you could make it extraordinarily rich by wishing to dream 75 years in one night full of glorious happenings. But after you had done that for a few months, you might begin to get a little tired of it. And you would say, “What about an adventure tonight in which something terribly exciting and rather dangerous is going to happen? But I’ll know I’m dreaming, so it won’t be too bad. And I’ll wake up if it gets too serious.” So you do that for a while. You rescue princesses in distress from dragons, and all sorts of things. And then, when you’ve done that for some time, you say, “Now, let’s go out a bit further. Let’s forget it’s a dream and have a real thrill!” Ooh! But you know you’ll wake up. And then, after you’ve done that for a while, you get more and more nerve until you sort of dare yourself as to how far out you can get. And you end up dreaming the sort of life you’re living now. - Alan Watts
https://alanwatts.org/transcripts/image-of-man/?highlight=The dream
The Egg
By: Andy Weir http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Are you god?” You asked.
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”
“My kids… my wife,” you said.
“What about them?”
“Will they be all right?”
“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”
“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”
“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”
“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”
You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”
“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”
“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”
“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”
“Where you come from?” You said.
“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”
“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”
“So what’s the point of it all?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
“I’m every human being who ever lived?”
“Or who will ever live, yes.”
“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”
“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.
“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.
“And you’re the millions he killed.”
“I’m Jesus?”
“And you’re everyone who followed him.”
You fell silent.
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
You thought for a long time.
“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”
“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”
“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”
“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”
“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”
“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”
And I sent you on your way.
It’s actually not from Epicurus, the origin is probably Sextus Empiricus.
Just addressing a common misconception, not that it changes the validity of the quote.
Not opening in Liftoff.
Loads fine in Eternity.
Ironic.
Same in Thunder
Loads fine in Jerboa
The only reasonably justification would for God to say: “I don’t have the ability to meddle. I’m not omnipotent. I did create your part of the multiverse. I can only set the laws of physics and initial conditions. Here’s how that works…Let me explain why you are here…something something multi dimensions…some creatures brains evolved quantum something something…which is what is commonly thought of as a soul…”
So we’re some jackass’s experiment.
The “god is a jackass” theorem. I like it.
There was actually a sect of Christianity that effectively argued for that kind of God.
They were quite influenced by Epicurean philosophy and naturalism though they disagreed with the Epicurean surety of death, arguing instead that while there was an original world of matter with original humans that developed spontaneously, that these original humans brought forth the creator of a copy of that original cosmos - not of matter, but of light. And that for the copies of humanity in that light-copy the finality of death was not inescapable.
But effectively, the world being a copy of one developed by naturalism for the explicit purpose of providing an afterlife largely skirts the moral quandaries. If the copy didn’t have children with bone cancer then it means whitewashing the copy such that only the naturally privileged are entitled to salvation, while those originally getting dealt a bad hand are erased from representation.
And actually their explanations literally did relate to the quantized aspects of matter (embracing Epicureanism meant embracing not just natural selection but also atomism, such that they were discussing indivisible points making up all things and being the originating cause of existence).
You even got statements like this:
Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
You don’t typically expect to see Jesus weighing in on naturalism as the greater wonder in contrast to the possibility of intelligent design.
Though if you really dig into it and notice that Lucretius 50 years before Jesus was even born was not only describing survival of the fittest and the emergence of modern life as the end result of indivisible seeds scattered randomly, but even described failed biological reproduction as “seed falling by the wayside of a path,” the guy killed in Judea for talking about how only the seeds which survived to reproduce multiplied and the ones that fell by the wayside of a path did not begins to take on a different context, as does the oddity of that being one of the few public sayings in the Synoptics that the church felt was necessary to claim had a “secret explanation” given to only their leadership.
(In this sect’s surviving text that parable comes immediately after a saying about how no matter if man ate lion or lion ate man that the lion becoming man was an inevitable result and how the human being is like a large fish selected from a bunch of small fish.)
Epicurus had great instincts. He was pretty damn close to things modern science has discovered. As you mentioned, he was an atomist. He also said you can generally trust your senses, but they can be wrong and deceive you at times. His ethics of moderation and valuing relationships is spot on when it comes to life satisfaction.
It’s interesting you mentioned naturalism in the evolutionary sense. Have you read Darwin’s book? Darwin’s ideas aren’t entirely original, he himself pretty much says that, but his data collection and observations were something that hadn’t been done on that level yet.
Epicurus was great. It’s a shame he’s not more widely taught. People come up learning Aristotle and thinking the Greeks had their heads up their asses, but don’t end up learning about the guy discussing light as quantized particles moving very quickly two millennia before Einstein wins a Nobel for experimentally proving that behavior, or writes about natural selection nearly two millennia before Darwin.
And yes, Darwin was actually familiar with the same book through his peers (though he claimed to have never read it). But you see rather remarkable level of detail for a lot of the core concepts:
In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn’t do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.
For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.
Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now."
- De Rerum Natura book 5 lines 837-859
Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair. Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh. For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be.
- book 4 lines 1217-1232
You can sometimes see a criticism of the first passage claiming that Leucretius saw those intermediate mutations as all existing all at once at the start, but that interpretation really seems to be putting too much weight on “in the beginning” and ignoring things like:
They take us by the hand and show that animals arise From things with no sensation at all.
- book 2 lines 870-871
Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain atoms suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings.
- book 2 lines 1058-1063
And it’s been pretty wild seeing a Christian sect quoting from a book that contains such an on point description of naturalism as we see it today.
For example, another parallel is the Epicurean attitudes about avoiding false negatives. They were adamant not to prematurely discard explanations for why something occurred, but rather to keep them around concurrently (it’s a large part of why they got so much right). Which is a bit similar to the discussion of leaving seeds alone when you don’t know which is wheat and which is weeds as eventually it will become clear and you can harvest the one and discard the other. An even more interesting saying in the context of a sect’s claiming the mustard seed was about an indivisible point as if from nothing or that the sower parable was about seeds scattered upon the world “through which the whole cosmical system is completed.”
Even laws of physics are bound by logic…logic supercedes even me…so a lot of my adjustments were to things like the gravitational constant and force magnitudes
I would actually respect this god. Not worship, but respect.
The philosopher and science fiction author Olaf Stapledon envisioned a god that was a creature creating universe after universe in order to make a mate. The mate had to be as aware as it is, so the whole universe has to be sentient. Our universe is just one in a long line of such universes and it isn’t the first or the last.
I don’t know if he actually believed it (it’s the denouement of his novel The Star Maker), but the idea is intriguing.
From the perspective of the simulation hypothesis, it’s possible that we exist not to exalt the programmer but to play out a given scenario that has no consideration of our well-being.
Modern experimental paleontology will sometimes use computer simulations (simple ones compared to the one we might be in) to try to better examine behaviors and evolutionary development. In some of them, prey objects can detect and try to evade, fight or escape predators aware of the conflict of interest between themselves and their hunter. So we already have simulations in which both the coder and the observing party (not always the same group) do not have an interest in the well being of any given internal entity. It’s not that they’re evil, just that they’re here to see how it plays out, ultimately to get it to match what appears in the geological record, which means they have a model. Still, it sucks to be a virtual life form in this world that is very much made not to be paradise for us, and will be halted and shut down as soon as the end users have the data they need.
Cosmic horror often examines the possibilities of a world created, but to which we are incidental or destined to an unhappy fate before we are consumed or discarded. The religions that are popular today are because we are opposed to such possibilities, not because benevolent deities are more likely than malevolent ones.
But that is also a cosmic horror of its own, that we naked apes are going to be limited by a general tendency to deny data-driven models if their implications are too unpleasant. Even if Great Cthulhu or Sithrak, The Blind Sufferer, or even Azathoth, The Nuclear Chaos were the true architects of this world, humans would still look for a judge/redeemer like Jesus to follow, and the ministries would exploit that. We are only the bare minimum of socially evolved to develop agriculture, and industry.
From the perspective of the simulation hypothesis, it’s possible that we exist not to exalt the programmer but to play out a given scenario that has no consideration of our well-being.
“And on the 8th day, He started to get bored, so He put a swimming pool, waited for some of His creations to get in, then removed the ladder. For the lulz” — possibly…
Remember the time he had to have everyone paint blood on their doors so he knew which babies to kill.
You mean the time he had to repeatedly harden the Pharaoh’s heart to keep punishing him and his people?
Talk about free will
For real, actually reading Exodus the firdt time and seeing the argument “evil happens because God has to let everyone have free will” immediately go out the window was an experience.
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Wasn’t New Testament (Jesus) the one that changed view to that God is all loving?
Yup. My fan theory is that old testament god is the new testament devil.
Fuck that is so good and totally theologically unsound.
Look into Gnosticism. That was part of thier creation myth.
Thanks, I will
Gnostics believed the old testament god is a malformed mistake, and it’s evil, blind, and jealous
Gnostics were Christians from ~100 to 400 CE
Yeah, through it flipped the paradigm from the proto-Gnostic thought, which instead had God brought forth by a spontaneously existing original man.
In parallel with the resurgence of Platonism, it flipped from “physical first, spiritual second” (as Paul mentioned in 1 Cor 15) to “spiritual first, physical second” and the eventual demiurge went from an agent of salvation escaping the Epicurean doom of a soul which depends on a naturally occurring physical body to an agent of corruption imprisoning the Platonic intelligently designed forms to corrupted and imperfect physical embodiment.
The earlier stuff is much more interesting than the later nonsense.
Not necessarily.
For example, look at the story of Solomon’s wise ruling.
It’s an anecdote about how to tell between a true parent and a false parent.
In that story, the false parent is the one who only cares about being recognized as the parent and is willing to see the child suffer and die to achieve that result.
Whereas the true parent is the one who cares the most about the child living as their complete unadulterated self even if that means being entirely unknown to them at all.
The tradition of God as a divine parent in Judaism goes back well before Jesus, and the Solomon story sounds a bit absurd as an actual ruling.
But it’s important to keep in mind that Solomon was a figure back in the polytheistic Israelite days which the version of the Old Testament we have today was actively rewriting the history of. So what was a poignant anecdote about the concept of the love of a true vs false parent dating from a period when Yahweh was married to the fertility mother goddess Asherah ends up just sort of randomly in there, surrounded by a bunch of claims about how Yahweh is a divine parent and if you don’t acknowledge him as that he’s going to smite you.
So it may have simply been changing it back to an earlier perspective. Potentially even informed by the above.
In fact, if you look extra-canonically, you can see Jesus saying:
Jesus said, “Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the child of a whore.”
(Solomon’s story above related to the child of a prostitute.)
Same for Christians lol.
They go to haven, so what’s the big deal?
The Jews, the Muslims or all dogs?
That movie made an atheist when I was little. The nuns at my school said that dogs don’t go to heaven because they don’t have souls, and I thought that was bullshit.
Depends on region
point to the region on the doll sir
Front page news story today about an 8 year old boy with a brain tumour suffering from partial paralysis and seizures.
Thanks God.
You’re welcome buddy.
Available options include:
- Believing in an evil god.
- Not believing in anything beyond physical reality.
- Not paying attention to reality and believing whatever delusion you feel like.
Most people choose option 3.
Those really aren’t the only options.
For example, it disregards the theology of a naturally occurring physical reality born out of entropy which eventually creates a god-like being which recreates the pre-god universe in order to resurrect it non-physically (a minor theology from around the first to fourth centuries CE).
A more modern version of a similar paradigm is simulation theory.
There’s a pretty wide array of options out there, it’s just that the most common tend to effectively fall into your groupings.
Sounds like variations on ‘Not paying attention to reality and believing whatever delusion you feel like.’
None of these have any bearing on or foundation in actual physical existence. They do nothing to describe or predict. There is nothing to them. They just fulfill some desire in the believer.
Sure, the fact that a hundred years ago physicists were scratching their heads arguing about whether the moon disappeared when no one was looking at it or why measuring a continuous behaving thing suddenly behaved discrete (and would go back to behaving continuous if the persistent information about its benefit was erased) is 100% unrelated to the fact that today we are building virtual worlds where continuous seed functions are converted into quantized units for tracking state changes from interactions by free agents.
We seem to keep failing at explaining how the continuous macro models of our universe that perfectly explain and correctly predict behaviors at large scales play nice with the discrete micro models that explain and predict behaviors at the small scales.
And yet because of thinking like yours that ideas about self-referential or recursive reality have no bearing on our physical reality, the majority of people studying these keep banging their heads at meshing them together rather than seriously entertaining the notion that the latter is an artifact necessary to low fidelity emulation of the former.
We’ve even just discovered sync conflicts with n+1 layers of Bell’s paradox which leads to papers titled things like “Stable Facts, Relative Facts” and an embracing of the idea that there’s aspects of reality with no objective accuracy, but we’re still stubbornly chugging away at modeling the universe as a singular original manifestation where such behaviors are inherent to the foundations of existence.
So no, you’re wrong. There’s actually quite a lot of potential relevancy to our physical reality with ideas like these - in fact the earlier group mentioned above claimed that the evidence for their beliefs was within the study of motion and rest (today in the discipline called Physics) and were extensively discussing the notion of matter being made up of indivisible parts, despite being around nearly two thousand years ago.
As for putting forward predictions, that again isn’t true.
For example, the aforementioned group predicting an original spontaneous humanity would bring forth the creator of a non-physical twin of the cosmos was also predicting it was established in light and that the copy was made of its light for the purpose of resurrecting dead humans by copying them into versions that don’t depend on physical bodies.
So if we end up developing AGI in light as opposed to electricity or biological computing, and that AGI continues to make more complex digital twins of our universe, especially extending the digital resurrection of dead humans, that’s a pretty wildly on point set of predictions for originating in the first to fourth centuries CE, no?
If this wasn’t connected to a religious figure but had been the equivalent of science fiction like Lucian’s describing a ship of men flying up to the moon (something he claimed would never happen as opposed to this group claiming the above would and had already happened), we’d be talking about it nonstop as eerily predictive of future developments.
But because religious people can’t handle the idea that their beliefs aren’t true and non-religious people often can’t handle entertaining that any religious-connected beliefs are true, ancient religious beliefs with oddly specific predictions that line up to developments in just the past few years are dismissed out of hand while the broader philosophy of self-referential reality is dismissed for similar reasons, dirtily considered as “religion in disguise.”
I’d think that a set of beliefs which successfully abandons appeals to the supernatural should be given more due consideration than beliefs that rely on magic, but no - too many are certain that the apparent local features of reality is all there is such that the two get lumped together.
For example, it disregards the theology of a naturally occurring physical reality born out of entropy which eventually creates a god-like being which recreates the pre-god universe in order to resurrect it non-physically (a minor theology from around the first to fourth centuries CE).
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Sounds like you’re saying that children dying is the good ending…? And, that Hitler being forced to hide in a bunker and physically shoot himself in the head while his evil empire was ripped to shreds was getting away with it, unless someone believes in your version of god?
So, you’re clearly in some demented version of option 3 (ignore reality/believe delusion), the most common option, as I outlined.
Maybe option 1 (evil god) with the whole child death thing though, idk…Sounds like their argument relies upon the existence of an afterlife, which leaves the burden of proof on them. Don’t strain yourself too hard on this one.
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We need far more tangible proof than that. I can claim wholeheartedly and faithfully the core of the earth is made of citrus. Until I provide tangible proof, I’m making things up.
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You’re preaching faith on an atheist community. What did you actually expect? People to renounce their ways and take up your faith?
I don’t expect you to trust me, but if you are fishing for a debate, you won’t get anywhere with an empty argument and zero tangible evidence. And no, some random jackass’s “testimony” doesn’t count.
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You’ve never faced down your own mortality or been in a seriously dark place, have you? I have. I don’t care how bad Hitler was, it’s not a pleasant feeling to contemplate ending things. It’s painful. It’s a position that you are put in by pain. I have enough empathy to realize that.
But more importantly, I’m not super fixated on punishment in general. I think that Hitler was obviously a horribly bad person, and that by him ending things he could no longer cause harm. That is enough.That people who believe in some god or other seem hyper fixated on retribution is not something in your favor. It does not paint you or your god in a good light. Good would be preventing bad things from happening in the first place.
Similarly, with regards to children, it is better not to have them if you can’t even make a reasonably successful effort to provide them with a more hopeful and better world full of greater opportunity and wonder and joy. That is the merciful route.
Not having children in an evil world is merciful. Wishing children die before puberty is monstrous. You argue to create pain in innocents.
You religious people with your notions of duty and retribution, pain and punishment are not painting a world or paradigm created by any kind of good entity.
You come into an atheism community and act all high and mighty as if you have something to impart to US?
It’s laughable. You have nothing but unfounded trash. You don’t come here to convince us. Be honest with yourself for one goddamned second. You come here to try and firm up the non-existent foundations of your faltering faith.
You have no proof or value to offer. Just gaping, naked need.
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None of us atheists come to your mosques. Yet, you come in here with unprovable notions and demand others prove them wrong for you. I’m done going point for point with you and extended you far too much courtesy.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
You have no evidence. And, absolutely nothing extraordinary.
The burden of proof lies on you. And, this is not the place for it, in any case.
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No one in the real world cares about justice whether they’re religious or not. It’s always been a nebulous concept and one quickly rejected at the slightest hint of it being inconvenient to the rich or the community at large. No deity in ANY belief system changes that fact; if anything, they only highlight how illusory justice really is.
And the third option: to change humanity to make it more just, never occurs to you
Man, religious people are a trip
I learned a long time ago that any god that does exist doesn’t care about our suffering, doesn’t love us, and is at best indifferent to us.
The Christian, all loving, all powerful, all knowing God is illogical.
You could have a God that is all loving and all knowing, but powerless to help us.
You could have a God that is all knowing and all powerful, but doesn’t love us enough to help us.
You could have a God that is all powerful and all loving, but ignorant of our suffering.
But more likely than that, there is no God at all.
Apologetics has an answer for all of those questions. Those answers are mostly informal fallacies, but you’re not going to convince someone who is already convinced there is a God and just needs some talking points.
If there is a god, i like the theory of the clockmaker god. He made this meticulous clockwork world/universe but now has to be content with just observing.
The theory is much older than computers. But nowadays it is easier explained with a simulation. As long as the simulation has a consistent internal logic, it is impossible to notice that we are in one (we are on the inside). But if external forces start to mess with it, the ppl inside could notice or there will be chain reactions hard to foresee.
@ToxicWaste @13esq this is in line with the “Deist” version of God. the Deism position is the belief that there is a God or Gods, but not of religious man-made lore.
while a deist can have different ideas of how that God or Gods behave, the most common deist belief is of a God who set the universe in motion, but does not influence it further than that.
i do agree that it’s a nicer idea of God where worship is not forced, arbitrary rules aren’t established, etc.
Voltaite was a well known deist
Still makes you ask the question for why such a God would create a simulation with so much pain and suffering.
Why do we humans create simulations? Maybe it is a science experiment, a prediction machine or just because we can…
@13esq @ToxicWaste well ya see, God likes to do a little bit of trolling.
God is a 4chan user
And what would be the point of worshipping it?
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Suffering: the state of undergoing pain, stress or hardship
Seem like quite sensible things to avoid if you can.
Do you have a counter point?
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That’s only if you can do something about it and in some cases were people can do something about it but convince themselves they cannot.
The only personal growth you can get from suffering you can do nothing about is in coping strategies - i.e. change yourself so that the suffering can be more easilly endured - and that’s for people whose coping strategy doesn’t lead them into becoming defeatist, fatalist or subservient (depening on the source and kind of suffering).
(Just look at people in abusive relationships who are unable to leave the abusive partner for great examples of how suffering leads some people to change in a direction which is the exact opposite of grow and develop)
I think it would be more correct to say that “challenge” allows us to grow and develop, which does include those forms of suffering were one can do something about it but that’s not easy to do (hence challenging)
Tell that to the African child dying of dysentery on a bank of a severely polluted river whilst a parasitic worm bores in to their eye ball.
Apologists like you make me sick.
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A parasitic worm boring through your body is necessary for the life of the parasitic worm, but God could have made a universe with no parasites if he wanted.
Stress and hardship can have many causes and many of them have no meaning at all. Being born in to a third world country with extreme poverty for example.
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Sure, and it wouldn’t be the same reality we live in
Yes, it would be a better one
Mostly an effect of how our reality works, there is no “meaning” necessary for cause and effect
God being loving yet allowing suffering doesn’t make it a paradox such that it disproves God
I’m not actually trying to disprove god here. But I do believe that if a god has subjected us to such suffering that can be shown in our world and in our histories, then not only is he underserving of our praise, but quite the opposite. There is plenty of evidence that shows that not only is god unloving but that they’re malevolent.
My 3rd world country has less suicides than your first world country (assuming you are USA)
Suffering is relative, and no matter how much of “bad” you remove from the world, suffering will persist
I’m not sure what your point is here.
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Created universe. Created flawed people. Created ETERNAL DAMNATION AND SUFFERING for the flawed people that they created.
Nice God.
Weeelllll… God does like to kill kids after all so he’s probably having a ball watching all this go down!
Psalms 137:9 - Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
1 Samuel 15:3 - Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
Exodus 12:29 - And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.
Sorry, He is too busy helping athletes win in sports to care about some tiny little conflict.
Yea little do people realize we were created to play basketball he only created us because he had this really sick idea for a game but he needed subjects to evolve so he can watch them play that game he thought of
That’s another god
You mean Sportacus?
I was thinking about Zeus, but this one works too
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I’m functionally an atheist. I certainly have a disdain for religious orgs.
I’d accept the argument that this, in fact, a test. If so, religious people are failing it.
There is a novel, and damned if I can remember the title, where a rabi proposes that god commanding Abraham to kill his son was a test, which he (Abraham) failed.
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My understanding of the story (in the novel, which I still can’t remember the name) was that in knuckling under to the command to murder his own child, Abraham failed the test.
Ha! Just remembered the name of the novel. Hyperion by Dan Simmons. The Rabies name was Sol Weintraub, for what that’s worth. OK, now I can think about something else…
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The implication I’m making is that a moral deity that allows free will might allow bad things to happen as a test for people to act morally. Religion, instead has been at the root of problems and/or stood by while bad people do bad things.
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Have no fear, I am now here!
I demanded an immediate cease fire.
Let me know if that worked? Send info via prayer since my cloud WiFi is sort of lame.
That implies that “God”, whatever that means, actually cares about hairless apes on a (quite likely) unremarkable rock.
But I thought I was a very important mote of dust in the universe that has a personal relationship with said sky fairy’s son?
We are not hairless tho
“Why the goat buggering fuck are you fighting over the desert? I put green stuff everywhere for you to live in. What do you mean you chopped it down? Why are you digging that stuff up and burning it? I buried it for a reason! Fuck this, where’d I put that flood machine?”
It’s always been innocent children’s lives. Cancer, sexual abuse, war crimes, starvation, the Church TM. It’s always been their lives and he’s never stepped in before. But maybe the land is more important to him. Oh wait… People have been fighting over it for thousands of years you say? Well then.
I mean he goes out of his way to murder kids so im sure he is happy
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